Singapore jails bloggers for racist remarks

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A Singapore court has sentenced two ethnic Chinese to prison for
posting racist remarks about ethnic Malays on the internet, in what
is considered a landmark case underscoring the government's
attempts to crack down on racial intolerance and regulate online
expression.

Animal shelter worker Benjamin Koh Song Huat, 27, was jailed for
one month while Nicholas Lim Yew, an unemployed 25-year-old, was
sentenced to a nominal prison term of one day and fined the maximum
$S5000 ($A3924) for racist comments against the minority Malay
community.

"Racial and religious hostility feeds on itself," said Senior
District Judge Richard Magnus in passing sentence on Friday.

"Young Singaporeans ... must realise that callous and reckless
remarks on racial or religious subjects have the potential to cause
social disorder, in whatever medium or forum they are expressed,"
he said.

Lim and Koh stood in the docks with their heads bowed as they
pleaded guilty to charges of committing acts "which had seditious
tendencies to promote feelings of ill-will and hostility between
different races and classes."

Lim had posted disparaging comments about Malays and Islam on an
internet forum for dog lovers in a discussion about whether taxis
should refuse to carry uncaged pets out of consideration for
Muslims, whose religion considers dogs unclean.

In his online journal, Koh had advocated desecrating Islam's
holy site of Mecca.

In mitigation, Lim and Koh's lawyers said their clients were
remorseful and had separately issued apologies. Their remarks have
been removed.

About 80 per cent of Singapore's 4.2 million people are ethnic
Chinese. Malays - mostly Muslims - make up 15 per cent
while the rest are ethnic Indians, Eurasians and others.

This small island republic is an oasis of calm in a region where
ethnic tensions sometimes explode into violence, particularly in
Indonesia. Singapore has not had traumatic racial experiences since
deadly Chinese-Malay riots in the 1960s.

The two cases represented the first time Singaporeans had been
prosecuted and convicted for racist expression under the Sedition
Act - a colonial-era law used by the British to fight a
communist insurgency - since the city-state's independence in
1965, the judge added.

It was necessary for the court "to make it clear that such an
offence will be met, upon conviction, with a sentence of general
deterrence," he said, and warned: "Bloggers who still have similar
offending remarks are well advised to remove them immediately."